Mexican Elite Research Articles

Mexican Elite - Ethnic Entrepreneurs, Crony Capitalism, and the Making of the Franco-Mexican Elite. By José Galindo. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2021. Pp. 240. $54.95 cloth; $54.95 e-book.

Mexican Elite - Ethnic Entrepreneurs, Crony Capitalism, and the Making of the Franco-Mexican Elite. By José Galindo. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2021. Pp. 240. 54.95 e-book. - Volume 79 Issue 1

Whiteness wars in Las niñas bien

ABSTRACT This article approaches whiteness in Mexico as the legacy of both the economic and ideological dimensions of the coloniality of power. Mexican cinema, though traditionally an agent in the idealization of the local construct of whiteness, has recently begun to turn a critical lens toward it, as in the case of Alejandra Márquez Abella’s 2018 film, Las niñas bien. Framed within decolonial thought, Bourdieu’s social theory, and critical race theory, this article carries out a close reading of the film to argue that it problematizes the white Mexican elite’s raced and gendered classism. In so doing, Las niñas bien works to dislodge the group as a social and cultural ideal while providing an incisive counterpoint to the democratic myth of Mexican mestizaje.

Overcoming Social Inequality in Mexico

The presented study examines certain aspects of Mexico’s social policy from the 19th century to the implementation of the key programs of the 2019-2024 National Development Plan.Aim. The study aims to identify the major causes and find solutions to one of the main problems of social development in Mexico - social stratification.Tasks. The authors determine the sequence of historical, political, and economic actions that have influenced social inequality; examine the factors that have led to social stratification; analyzestatistics pertaining to reforms; examine the programs of Mexico’s 2019-2024 National Development Plan.Methods. This study uses general scientific methods of cognition to identify social development trends in Mexico’s socio-economic policy and the underlying internal and external factors, and to analyze the directions of the programs of Mexico’s 2019-2024 National Development Plan.Results. Social inequality in Mexico can be traced back to medieval times. Since the 19th century, oppressed people have been openly asserting their social standing. Significant social stratification and an overwhelming number of poor people with little education cannot resist the country’s political system. There is constant pressure from foreign countries, particularly from the United States, on the political order of Mexico through the promotion of foreign standards aimed at deriving profit for other countries and the Mexican elite. The country’s domestic regulation is carried out in the context of limited wage growth, lack of a progressive taxation system, and disparate accessibility of social benefits for different population groups. Since the beginning of the 21st century, introduction of socially oriented programs has reduced social inequality, but it remains too high in comparison with developed and developing countries.Conclusions. A study of the country’s socio-economic policy since the 19th century reveals features that are specific to Mexico: a very high level of corruption and criminality, social stratification with an overwhelming number of low-income people and general marginalization hinder the country’s social development and economic growth. The middle class is poorly developed and cannot provide the domestic consumption necessary for the stable development of Mexico and reduction of the country’s dependence on its trading partners. Population support measures are ineffective in the context of the established way of life.

Answer to comment by René Cabral

We thank Rene Cabral for his comments and suggestions on our paper Inequality and minimum wage policy: Not even talking, much less walking in Mexico (2015). It seems to us that although Cabral does identify some omissions in our paper, in general terms he agrees with most of our main conclusions. These are that the high inequality in Mexico is socially and economically inefficient; that it is indispensable to further study the links between inequality and minimum wages in Mexico; that this relationship, as well as the very low levels of minimum wages in Mexico, might have something to do with the less-than-optimal growth records of recent decades; that the chances for the legal delinking ( desvinculacion ) of minimum wages to other non-labor related variables as well as the implementation of a new policy to increase them in a significant and sustainable way in the country ―fiercely opposed by some sectors of the Mexican elite― will depend to a large extent on politics...

Inequality and minimum wage policy: Not even talking, much less walking in Mexico

This paper examines the evolution of economic inequality in Mexico in the last three decades, both in terms of the personal distribution and the functional distribution of income, partly exploring the question of how much of its evolution is determined by economic or social policies. The second purpose of our paper is to analyze the relation between the evolution of the functional distribution of income and labor policy, with special emphasis on minimum wage policy. Finally our third objective, closely linked to the previous two, is the examination of the institutional context as well as the ideological and political economy considerations that have marked minimum wage policy in Mexico in view of the successful attempt to bring the debate back to the forefront of the political agenda. As such, our analysis will pay special attention to events since May 1st 2014, when the Chief of the Government of Mexico City launched a national discussion on the urgent need, ways and means to renovate minimum wage policy in Mexico. In our view, this debate is perhaps the only recent expression in Mexico of the current re-found concerted focus on inequality on a global scale, an expression that has woken up fierce opposition from key sectors of the Mexican elite and highly placed government officers in the current administration.

Feminicide: Theorizing Border Violence

FeminicideTheorizing Border Violence Martha Idalia Chew Sánchez Gender Violence at the U.S.-Mexico Border: Media Representation and Public Response. Edited by Héctor Domínguez-Ruvalcaba and Ignacio Corona. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010. Pp. 200. $50.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780816527120. Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Americas. Edited by Rosa-Linda Fregoso and Cynthia Bejarano. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Pp. xxviii + 382. $94.95 cloth. $25.95 paper. ISBN: 9780822346814. Making a Killing: Femicide, Free Trade, and La Frontera. Edited by Alicia Gaspar de Alba with Georgina Guzman. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010. Pp. x + 314. $55.00 cloth. $24.95 paper. ISBN: 9780292723177. Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican National Imaginaries. By Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Pp. xviii + 374. $94.95 cloth. $25.95 paper. ISBN: 9780822350750. Cities and Citizenship at the U.S.-Mexico Border: The Paso del Norte Metropolitan Region. Edited by Kathleen Staudt, César M. Fuentes, and Julia E. Monárrez Fragoso. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Pp. xxi + 250. $95.00 cloth. $31.00 paper. ISBN: 9780230100329. Publication of four edited volumes that examine femicide in the Mexico-US border region adds immensely to our understanding of that phenomenon, particularly when they are read through the lens of Nicole M. Guidottie-Hernández’s Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican National Imaginaries, which traces violence in the borderlands from the nineteenth century to the present and demonstrates how violence has shaped people’s identities in the border area. These books tap many of the foremost authors on femicide, who bring to their analyses a wide array of disciplinary approaches and touch upon a host of related themes. Guidottie-Hernández’s work is informed by Chicano studies, borderland history, transnational feminism, and Latino studies. Guidottie-Hernández theorizes on the continuous mutation and situationality of national membership, rights, and birthrights. She explains some of the ways that exclusionary practices of membership, made manifest in policing racialized, gendered, and sexualized subjects, have obscured the physical and psychological pain and trauma inflicted on such communities. She successfully demonstrates how competing understandings of [End Page 263] racial projects have worked in tandem to “produce proper subjects in the borderlands” (8). Guidottie-Hernández traces physical and discursive violence to explain shifting notions of citizenship linked to the expansion of capitalism in the borderlands. In her reading, full citizens tend to maintain a “sense of bodily and physical integrity” (7). The moments and markers of differentiations in citizenship are inscribed through violence and denial of access to justice, land, resources, and control of the body, and through vigorous policing. For Guidottie-Hernández what is important about such notions of citizenship are the alliances that existed at various points in time between the Mexican and US nation-states in the persecution and terrorization of Yaquis, the collusion of the Mexican elite and some Papago Indians in the grand massacre of Apache and other nomadic Indians, and the elitist Mexican-American interpretation of racial dynamics in Texas. Guidottie-Hernández makes a major theoretical contribution to border theory and Chicano studies in that she problematizes the concept of mestizaje, which essentializes and dehistoricizes Indian identity in the borderlands. Throughout her book, the author demonstrates how the mestizaje concept masks inequalities, disruptions, and heterogeneities within indigenous groups and indeed all racial groups in Mexico. She is also critical, and rightly so, of privileging the Aztec heritage, as most Chicano studies works tend to do. In particular, she interrogates the construction of Aztecs as a single indigenous group of common cultural, spiritual, and ethnic heritage for Chicanos and Mexicans, and the resulting lack of integration in the Chicano consciousness of the Apaches, Comanches, Havasupais, Hopi, Jemezes, Kiowa Apaches, Lipans, Papagos, and Pimas, to mention some other groups. Guidottie-Hernández calls to mind the forgotten pain inflicted on the Yaquis and Apaches during Mexican- and US-sponsored terrorizing wars. Further, she exposes the historically unacknowledged periodic active alliances of some indigenous and Mexican groups with Anglo-American elites in such endeavors. Building upon research on histories of violence and displacement of racialized and sexualized bodies...

Psychological Skills in Mexican Elite Athletes

Psychological Skills in Mexican Elite Athletes

Televisa's Brozo: The Jester as Subversive Humorist

This study utilizes, rhetorically, the case of a Mexican television personality, Brozo, whose format includes satiric humorous communication and subversion of the authority of the Mexican elite on a morning television news program. Brozo's incursion into the realm of the elite television newscast implies an adversarial relationship, which he attains structurally through such devices as comic theatre and the role of the Jester. This study argues that Brozo's humorous communication can be seen as subversive and as contributing to the development of a shared critique of power in the Mexican political realm. Consequently, Brozo's humorous communication is a contestive strategy provoking possibility of societal change.

Immigrant Positioning in Twentieth-Century Mexico: Middle Easterners, Foreign Citizens, and Multiculturalism

Immigrant Positioning in Twentieth-Century Mexico: Middle Easterners, Foreign Citizens, and Multiculturalism

A Fighter from Way Back: The Mexican War Diary of Lt. Daniel Harvey Hill, 4th Artillery, USA

A Fighter from Way Back: Mexican War Diary of Lt. Daniel Harvey Hill, 4th Artillery, USA. Edited by Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes Jr. and Timothy D. Johnson. (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2002. Pp. ix, 370. Maps, illustrations. Cloth, $39.00.)Historians of Mexican-American War often have employed Daniel Harvey's Hill's letters on The Army in to discuss conditions in American Army of Occupation in camp at Corpus Christi and on march to Matamoros from July 1845 to April 1846. In particular, these letters often have been used as evidence of logistical difficulties facing U. S. forces during War with Mexico. Hill, more widely famous as a Confederate general, was an irritable man, and his impatience led him to pessimism and acerbic judgments on all he encountered. In this diary, kept from Hill's departure for South Texas in May 1846 until his departure from Veracruz in March 1848, young West Pointer turned his intellect on everything he saw, usually critically. His dismissive views of Mexico-its politics, economy, religion, and inhabitants-were representative of most U. S. observers, and Hill's chauvinism, combined with Mexican poverty, led to increasingly negative judgments as war went on. Indeed, Hill began to label potential effect of U. S. victories on Mexico providential, another reaction common among invaders, for whom cultural contact did not inspire amity. Many Americans were awed by Mexican landscape, enjoyed Mexican food and companionship of Mexican women, and showed great curiosity during early months of their time in Mexico, but many reacted like Hill, either because they encountered Mexican antagonism more frequently or because they increasingly noted dark skins and poverty of Indian and mestizo inhabitants rather than light skins and wealth of Mexican elite on whom they initially focused their observations.Hill criticized all his superiors, and, most bitterly and even more often volunteers and new regiments raised for Regular Army, which he singled out as worthless raw levy (149-50). This antipathy was partly a function of Hill's West Point education and his consequent valuation of professional expertise, partly due to his antipathy to partisan politics (the basis for most of officer appointments in new regiments), and most of all due to volunteers' lack of discipline, which Hill found objectionable both practically and morally. (A quest for professional expertise and antipathy to partisanship also lay behind Hill's criticism of army's supply effort, criticism ultimately directed at civilian secretary of war rather than uniformed supply bureaus.) Indeed, Hill's diary reads as a sustained indictment of volunteers, for endemic indiscipline and pandemic violence against civilians, providing literally dozens of references to volunteer atrocities. (Regular soldiers, under often atrocious discipline themselves, rarely committed such acts, fearing lash and other tortures their officers inflicted.) In a rare moment of humor, Hill observed, the whole Regiment of 3d Dragoons (one of new regiments authorized for duration of war) is not worth three tacos (179).Hill made a number of insightful comments on army's morale, especially in moments before battle, though he referred only briefly to his own expectations on eve of battle. …

Integral Outsiders: The American Colony in Mexico City, 1876-1911

Chapter 1 Introduction: Integral Outsiders: Model and Overview Chapter 2 Life Sketches of the American Colony Chapter 3 Colonel R. C. Pate: Culture, the Economy, and Hemispheric Politics Chapter 4 Land, Church, and Society Chapter 5 Tourist Investors and Tributary Capitalism Chapter 6 Tropical Mafia: The Deep Politics of Dollar Diplomacy Chapter 7 Greater Mexico: The Deep Politics of Hegemony Chapter 8 Chaos at Porfirian Twilight

Beneméritos, aristócratas y empresarios: Identidades y estructuras sociales de las capas altas urbanas en América hispánica

These 15 essays were presented at a namesake symposium in Cologne in December 1998. Identidades implies the cultural, the mentalité. In a Hispanic context, as Frédérique Langue reminds us, that signifies a craving for ennoblement through martial prowess. In fact, most papers highlight an elite dynamic based on migrants, money, and matrimony. Understandably, the anthology’s four-fold division—into core areas, border areas, long-term vertical studies, and lesser centers—does not relate to the content of the several contributions.Two studies appear misplaced: Pedro Guibovich Pérez’s on Lima chronicles, for its irrelevance; and Susan Socolow’s advice on refining research as too scant. Four are general summations. John E. Kicza sure-footedly reviews the Mexican elite through 1700: About 50–60 households of encomenderos and merchants, all rich and centrally located, and staying on top through diversification and endogamy. Barbara Potthast lucidly surveys Paraguay’s ruling mestizos whose autonomy relied on their isolation and conquistador ancestry. In the eighteenth century, they succumbed to plebeian discontent and to commercialization, but held on in the countryside. Proud yet “illegitimate,” these mancebos de la tierra founded the national ethos. Germán Cardozo Galué and Arlene Urdaneta de Cardozo offer a clear, two-dimensional history of Maracaibo through 1870. Its political theme is the losing fight for autonomy; the social a continuous reshaping of the capa alta, by Basques and Catalans before 1800, Englishmen in the 1820s, and Germans in the 1840s. Listing old and new lineages, Arturo Sorhegui traces the sixteenth-century rise of the Havana-based señores de hato and of their seventeenth-century replacement by Andalusian merchants and crown officials. A prolix prelude, going back to Spain’s reconquista, presumes to provide the proper historical perspective.Two scholars rely on new work by colleagues. Cristina Mazzeo de Vivó previews a cooperative study of eight leading Lima merchants from northern Spain, 1760–1820. Their marriage strategies mixed wealth-preserving inbreeding with prestige-enhancing links to older clans. These strategies survived Napoleon, but the divisive war of independence ruined five out of the eight. María Rosaria Stabili sums up Los vascos en Chile (1998), by Trinidad Zaldívar and her coauthors. The book identifies 418 Basques who entered Chile between 1680 and 1820 and refounded Santiago’s elite. Stabili parses the mercantile and matrimonial linkages of Basque progress, then the ideology of the renewed establishment. Money was required to join but its values centered on sobriety, service, culture, and the Basque sense of hidalguía.The remaining five invited presenters may be grouped in a roughly ascending order of novelty. Inés Quintero embraces the estamento nobiliario in Venezuela (actually Caracas). Singularly free of intruders, her titled linajudos exploit “the wise” 1776 pragmática to prevent “slippery marriages.” Michel Bertrand’s essay presents eighteenth-century Mexico through a prosopography of treasury officials. Most were Peninsulares from humble backgrounds, but they married wealthy. Juan Pablo Ferreiro’s detailed chronicle of early Jujuy is a tale of Montagues and Capulets—the Argañarazes and the Zárate-Ovandos—ending happily por vía matrimonial. Poor and small, Jujuy enjoyed “limited democracy” in the “progressively eliticized” cabildo, where the feud was fought. For Bourbon Zacatecas, Frédérique Langue features the upward path of immigrant Fernando de la Campa Cos from war-won land grants and knighthood. His kin married powerful officials and wealthy miners. As a count and a patriarch, he supervised investments, marriages, and mayorazgos. In addition, he insured his regional control through godfather-hood, loans to entrepreneurs, gifts to the king, and shelter for outlaws. Chantal Cramaussel had the original idea of locating—via the death registers of baroque Parral—the ten men who controlled the most workers. These ten apparently dominated the mine. Only two were Mexican-born, a mestizo and a mulato. However, all of them married norteñas—prerequisite to their long-term success, and a safe bargain for their local in-laws.The contributions of the conference sponsors appear at the end of the book. Bernd Schröder supports his picture of patrician Montevideo from archival sources —parochial, notarial, judicial, confraternal—and schematizes his findings in five tables and nine graphs. The latter demand statistical training and good eyesight. His emphasis on the titles of don and doña might also be questioned, but not his conclusion: By 1800 elite Peninsular merchants equaled the number of elite estancieros, half of whom likewise came from Spain. Christian Büschges applies a Weberian Idealtyp of nobility to late-eighteenth-century Quito. Down on its obrajes and trade, the 20-odd-thousand-strong city boasted 500 self-styled nobles, led by 10 títulos and 13 hábitos. Public office confirmed status. Landholding supported a noble lifestyle but no prestige accrued from mere gain. In their “Final Reflections,” Büschges and Schröder supply a tipología esquematizada of elite growth and identities. Theirs is a Sisyphean attempt to fit the several pieces, but it does not detract readers from this worthwhile variorum.

Mores and Democracy in Latin America

Mores and Democracy in Latin America Enrique Krauze (bio) In at least two passages in Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville draws illuminating comparison between the political life of the United States and that of Mexico. The Mexican people, blessed with rich soil and “not less fortunately situated” (I, 321) than the people of the United States, had copied the constitution and the federal system of their neighbors. Yet “although they had borrowed the letter of the law,” the Mexicans were unable to capture the spirit that had inspired it: “They were involved in ceaseless embarrassments by the mechanism of their dual government; the sovereignty of the states and that of the Union perpetually exceeded their respective privileges and came into collision; and to the present day, Mexico is alternately the victim of anarchy and the slave of military despotism” (I, 167). Tocqueville was writing at the beginning of the 1830s, and his account of Mexico was accurate. Although Mexico’s imminent loss of Texas was already on the horizon because of the economic and cultural predominance of Anglo-Saxon immigrants, the natural situation, in terms of size and resources, was in fact comparable in the two countries. Mexico seemed to be “a horn of plenty,” particularly in its practically unexplored northern region, which a few years later, after the war of 1847, would fall into American hands. But in terms of human geography, the differences between the two national experiments were clear. The United States was a country of immigrants in perpetual movement from “the middle of Europe” to “the solitudes of the New World,” the promised land for 13 million hardworking people looking [End Page 18] toward the future (I, 292). Mexico, by contrast, was the sedentary home of eight million people—most of them native-born—with no sense of national identity and with no viable economic or political project. Mexico was a mosaic of numerous and diverse communities, villages, small towns, and autarchic haciendas whose vocation—except for certain urban elites—was to persevere within the deep historical matrix inherited from the seventeenth century. The birth of the United States and the French Revolution had exerted a crucial influence on the outbreak of Mexico’s own struggle for independence, a cruel and bloody war that went on for ten years, only to end up in a monarchy with no possibility of legitimacy. Spain refused to send over a member of the royal family (as Portugal had done for Brazil). Soon thereafter, in 1824, the politically active Mexican elite created a federal republic founded on a constitution very similar to the U.S. Constitution, which Mexican liberals of the time judged as “one of the most perfect creations of the human spirit.” Nevertheless, as Tocqueville pointed out, the 1824 Constitution and similar ones in several Mexican states never became anything more than dead letters. Before its first decade of independent life ended, Mexico, like most of the countries of Spanish America and like Spain itself during most of the nineteenth century, had fallen into a scenario of volcanic politics: riots, military uprisings, and revolutions, each proposing a new constitution. The conservatives, who felt that the new nation should preserve to the greatest degree possible the Spanish matrix, proposed centralist laws and institutions, a protectionist economy, barriers to the immigration of peoples whose race or beliefs were alien to Spanish tradition, an international stance favoring the Catholic countries of Europe, close ties between Church and state in matters of education and faith, and a political system that would exalt the executive power over a weak, virtually nonexistent legislative body. The liberals, on the other hand, wanted a clean slate. Their model was the United States, and Democracy in America was part of their bedside reading. The first Spanish translation of Tocqueville’s classic dates back to 1837. The central figures of mid-nineteenth-century Mexican liberalism (Crescencio Rejón, José Fernando Ramírez, and Mariano Otero) considered it “admirable” and quoted it frequently. They took from it the embryo of federal laws, individual rights, and republican practices (such as the supremacy of the Supreme Court in ruling on disputes between state and federal power) that would ultimately mature...

Politics and the Technology of Honor: Dueling in Turn-of-the-Century Mexico

Since the last decades of the nineteenth century, dueling beame increasingly frequent among Mexican elite men. The duel was associated with modern science and the cosmopolitan culture of the national ruling class. Authorities refused to prosecute duelists. The translation and production of texts on dueling, as well as the influence of some experienced duelists, conveyed to public men the importance of a technology of honor. This technology, which involved the use of pistols and the knowledge of codes of dueling, sought to establish a space in which all members of the political elite, regardless of their ideological affiliation, could claim the same kind of honor. After the 1910 Revolution, as violence became widely associated with politics, duels became less frequent, but the concern among public men about honor and virility expressed by violence remained visible in political life, as witnessed by several episodes in Congress. The technology of honor was a central piece in the construction of a modern public sphere in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Mexico. It granted equality to educated men, while excluding women and the poor from having a voice in politics. These lacked honor because they could not legitimately use violence to defend it.

Redeeming the Society which Rejected Them The Mayan Rebellion in South West Mexico

AbstractThe impact of the peasant rebellion in southeast Mexico has resonated far beyond the region. Part of the reason for this was the upsurge of unrest in a country whose government was a champion of fast-track neo-liberal reforms. The uprising appeared to be a timely indictment of these economic reforms - a view which seemed further confirmed by the rebellion's coincidence with the creation of the NAFTA. Our paper acknowledges the significance of these facts but argues first for a deeper historical perspective. The Mayan rebellion criticises not only neo-liberalism but also the whole post-revolutionary trajectory. We also argue for the need to take into account a variety of intervening factors which facilitated the rebellion. One inspiration for the rebellion came from an unexpected source - from a radical section of the Catholic Church, a church which had supposedly been buried as a political force for over a hundred years. The combination of theology of liberation and the sensitivity of post-1968 radicals to indigenous traditions behind the uprising exposed the extent to which the Mexican elite had systematically disregarded the condition of the indigenous population.

Racial fault lines: the historical origins of white supremacy in California

This book unravels the ethnic history of California since the late nineteenth-century Anglo-American conquest and institutionalization of 'white supremacy' in the state. Almaguer comparatively assesses the struggles for control of resources, status, and political legitimacy between the European American and the Native American, Mexican, African-American, Chinese, and Japanese populations. Drawing from an array of primary and secondary sources, he weaves a detailed, disturbing portrait of ethnic, racial, and class relationships during this tumultuous time. The U.S. annexation of California in 1848 and the simultaneous discovery of gold sparked rapid and diverse waves of immigration westward, displacing the already established pastoral Mexican society.Almaguer shows how the confrontation between white immigrants and the Mexican ranchero and working class populations was also a contestation over racial status in which racialization influenced and was in turn influenced by class position in the changing economic order. Partly because of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which granted U.S. citizenship and other rights, parts of the Mexican population were integrated into the emerging Anglo society more easily than other racialized groups. A case study of Ventura County highlights declining political and economic fortunes of the Mexican elite while showing how Mexican, Japanese, Chinese, and Indian populations were permanently relegated to the bottom of the class structure as unskilled manual workers. The fate of the Native American population provides perhaps the most extreme example of white supremacy during the period. Popular conceptions of Native Americans as 'uncivilized and 'heathen', justified the killing of more than 8,000 men, women, and children between 1848 and 1870.Many survivors were incorporated at the periphery of Anglo society, often as indentured labourers and virtual slaves. Underpinning the institutional structuring of white supremacy were notions such as 'manifest destiny,' the inherent good of the capitalist wage-system, and the superiority of Christianity and Euro-American culture, all of which helped to marginalize non white groups in California and justify Anglo-American class dominance. As other racialized groups assumed new roles, Almaguer assesses the complex interplay between economic forces and racial attitudes that simultaneously structured and allocated 'group position' in the new social hierarchy. California remains a contested racial frontier, as political struggles over the rights and opportunities of different groups continue to reverberate along racial lines. Racial Fault Lines is an invaluable contribution to our understanding of ethnicity and class in America, and the social construction of 'race' in the Far West.

Painting the Maya Universe: royal ceramics of the classic period

Lavishly illustrated with nearly 400 color images, Painting the Maya Universe is the most thorough study and brilliant display of Classic Maya ceramic painting yet published. Building on twenty years of research and debate, Dorie Reents-Budet and her collaborators Joseph W. Ball, Ronald L. Bishop, Virginia M. Fields, and Barbara MacLeod bring together many perspectives, including the art historical, archaeological, epigraphical, and ethnohistorical, to examine one of the world's great but overlooked painting traditions. With an emphasis on sixth- to eighth-century pottery featuring both pictorial and hieroglyphic imagery, Painting the Maya Universe presents an extraordinary exploration of the cultural roles and meanings of these Guatemalan, Belizean, and Mexican elite painted ceramics. Maya pottery is discussed both in aesthetic terms and for the important information it reveals about Maya society, artistry, politics, history, religion, and ritual. The range of ceramic painting styles developed during this period is also presented and defined in detail. Painting the Maya Universe is the first publication to present a definitive translation of the hieroglyphic texts painted on these objects. With many glyphs deciphered here for the first time, this analysis reveals much about how these vessels were perceived and used by the Maya, their owners' names, and, in several cases, the names of the artists who created them. This information is combined with archaeological and other data, including nuclear chemical analyses, to correlate painting styles with specific Maya sites. Published in conjunction with Duke University Museum of Art and an exhibition touring the United States, Painting the Maya Universe presents an astonishing visual record as well as a monumental scholarly achievement. With photographs by Justin Kerr, the foremost photographer of pre-Columbian art, it includes over 90 unique full-color rollout photographs, each showing the entire surface of an object in a single frame. The book also addresses the questions and controversy regarding the loss of information that occurs when objects are removed from their archaeological context to become part of public and private collections. Painting the Maya Universe will energize discussion of Maya pottery, hieroglyphic texts, and iconography. Its photographs, a lasting resource on this great painting tradition, will stimulate and delight the eye. It is a breakthrough in art history and Latin American scholarship that will enrich general readers and scholars alike.

The origins and sustainability of Mexico's free trade policy

Standard explanations for trade liberalization do not fully account for Mexico's turn toward free trade during the 1980s. To a large extent, the initiative came from within the country. Even many Mexican entrepreneurs whose sectors seem likely to lose from increased competition now support trade liberalization. Four conditions lowered the “political cost-benefit ratio” for policymakers and entrepreneurs. First, Mexico's leaders dispersed implementation into several financial ministries, thereby better insulating this policy from lobbying by the likely “losers.” Second, potential losers were less well-informed than were likely “winners.” Third, under these conditions, the liberal ideological biases of Mexican elite policymakers and investors flourished, prompting them to accept a higher political cost than would have been tolerated otherwise. Finally, many Mexicans came to perceive trade liberalization as a necessary tool in the fight against inflation. Each of these hypotheses, however, also flags a possible threat to the policy's future political survival.

A Mexican Elite Family, 1820-1980: Kinship, Class, and Culture. LARISSA ADLER LOMNITZ and MARISOL PEREZ-LIZAUR.

A Mexican Elite Family, 1820-1980: Kinship, Class, and Culture. LARISSA ADLER LOMNITZ and MARISOL PEREZ-LIZAUR.

A Mexican elite family, 1820-1980: kinship, class, and culture

A Mexican elite family, 1820-1980: kinship, class, and culture